Maia Sharp. Photo by Anna Haas
Singer-songwriter Maia Sharp releases her ninth album, called “Reckless Thoughts,” on Friday and will be playing several songs from it during a solo performance in Portland on Aug. 26.
Sharp has been writing songs since the ’90s, and through the years, several well-known acts, including Bonnie Raitt, The Chicks and Cher, have recorded songs she’s written.
The California native relocated to Nashville in 2019 following the end of a long-term relationship and is loving life in Tennessee.
The divorce and cross-country move provided Sharp with cathartic material for the 2021 release “Mercy Rising,” and “Restless Thoughts” is something of a next chapter.
“I’m just generally a calmer, stronger person now, two years later, on the other side of a lot of those very big changes that were the inspiration for the last album,” said Sharp during an interview from her home.
“This album is written from the perspective of living through that and having some of the answers that I was asking on the last album and just kind of finding more of a calm and there’s just generally less anxiety.”
The track “She’ll Let Herself Out,” co-written with Dean Fields, is an upbeat tune that bursts with liberation.
Digging in the dirt
She tapped into an underground river
Let it rise and baptize
Now she don’t need anyone to forgive her
A personal favorite of mine on “Reckless Thoughts” is “Gone Cryin.” Sharp wrote it with Elizabeth Elkins via Zoom about a week after folk singer John Prine died from COVID in the early days of the pandemic.
The idea for this song came from an image that Sharp had in her mind about a small town with a wooden sign hung on a store’s front door that said “gone cryin'” rather than the traditional “gone fishin.'”
After Sharp and Elkins agreed they wanted to pay a musical homage to Prine, the song flowed out of them easily. “We wanted to give each other permission to just feel sad,” she said – not only about Prine, but the pandemic itself. Sharp said it was a scary time, and though things like learning how to bake sourdough bread or learning a new language were fine coping mechanisms for some people, it was important for her to experience the fear. “Maybe we just needed to feel like (expletive) for a minute and just let this all not be great for a couple of days.”
The result is a tender, sweeping song that pulls at the heartstrings with Sharp’s warm alto vocals and poignant lyrics.
Some people start drinking
Some people stop living
And shelter their heart from the light
When you feel like your sinking
There’s a long lost tradition
Have you ever gone cryin’ to get right
“Fallen Angel” is a rootsy Americana and rock tune that Sharp wrote after experiencing the emotional phases of an unrequited crush.
“I had enough feelings to use for fuel for a song,” she said. The first lines – “Honey don’t fall for a fallen angel/I said baby you never had wings” – were stored in Sharp’s phone for about a year. “So I just went back and, with the feelings that I knew were probably temporary and that line, I just created a conversation like if we were really gonna go forward with our thing, how would that conversation roll.” Sharp succeeded; the song cruises along at a steady clip, as electric guitar from Joshua Grange flares here and there, and Eric Darken keeps a steady beat. Sharp plays acoustic guitar and Wurlitzer (organ) on the tune.
Sharp plans to include mostly tracks from “Reckless Thoughts” and “Mercy Rising” with a small handful of older tunes strewn in on her current run of shows.
“I’m so in the zone with these last two albums, they feel like the true version of me. I feel like I figured out who I am now, and these albums are accurately representing that,” she said.
Lucky us because, although I love songs on all nine of Sharp’s albums, “Mercy Rising” and now “Restless Thoughts” are Sharp at her finest, both lyrically and vocally.
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